Product Reviews & Ratings

Tuesday, 22nd October, 2013

It obviously isn't needed, no. I mean, you can run entire campaigns without referencing a Bestiary, let alone all the ones you can run with just the books you mentioned.
But I'm looking forward to getting Bestiary 4, mostly for the Mythic beasties. Cthulhu? Colossi? Demon lords? Grendel?
And if you don't want to buy it, as paradox42 mentioned, it'll be up on the PRD. So even the people who don't want to drop $40 get a bunch of sweet new monsters, funded by the people who are willing to drop the cash.
I find it's pretty hard to argue with that, personally.
Cheers!
Kinak

Saturday, 7th September, 2013

That sounds interesting. I'll try and hunt down a few of those books to get a better idea of what the far realms embodies.
paradox42 That paladin link didn't work for me. I'll try again tomorrow because I'll never say no to a glance at awesome NPC's that I can then shamelessly model my own NPC's after hehe.

Saturday, 11th May, 2013

@paradox42 - I editted my post to include the anti-paladin of AD&D 1e, which was designed before UA. Too late, apparently, to get my meaning into your post. I really meant to include the anti-paladin in my initial post, but somehow it got posted before I was finished. (My keyboard is funny that way - it happens a lot.)
I never bought many Dragon magazines, usually only Halloween issues due to my love of undead things, so I never would have known about the Dragon magazine variants - as a point of order. I bought every hardback, though.

Friday, 10th May, 2013

I agree with @paradox42 that the Paladin has traditionally been expected to be lG, not Lg, and prioitize Good over Law. If we are taking the step of converting the Paladin to a crusader for one alignment, whatever that alignment may be, perhaps we should step back from that viewpoint. A NG Paladin would espouse Good only. He would Detect and Smite Evil, and Law and Chaos would be unimportant to him. Similar the other "pure" alignments. A CN Paladin would believe in freedom and indiviuality above all else. The CN Paladin would not believe one's right to swing one's fist ends where another's nose begins - nothing can curtail individual freedom - where the CG paladin would balance that freedom with the wellbeing of others, probably having the more traditional view that the right to swing one's fist ends where another's nose begins.
Perhaps this requires non-polar alignments select one of the two elements to predominate. The classic lG Paladin will compromise Law in the interests of Good, detects evil, sm...

Sunday, 28th April, 2013

57223
I spent the afternoon putting this together so you can get an idea of where I am headed with this. Thanks to paradox42 for giving me something to put into levels 6, 12, and 18.
1) I wanted an incarnate's invested essentia in a single souldmeld to be 9 by the time he reached 20th level to be able to at least keep the DCs on par with those of primary spellcasters. So an incarnate (and the totemist as well when I get around to cleaning it up) can invest 4 essentia based on his level and expanded soulmeld capacity goes up to +5. A number of soulmelds will need to be reworked, but most of them will actually be just fine the way they are since many soulmelds were actually fairly weak in 3.5 as it was.
2) I don't like the idea of essentia capacity being based on character level only. I think it should be a minimum of one and the lesser of character level or the number of incarnum feats a character has (although meldshapers would be an exception). So a character with only one incarnum feat could only invest one essentia in a feat regardless of level.
3) I want to flatten the essentia capacity rate to 1/5 le...

Saturday, 27th April, 2013

I am beginning to work on converting Magic of Incarnum to Pathfinder. So far, I have found this thread to be of immense use for ideas. I actually started working on things myself and discovered that paradox42 and I are of like mind on a few things which was cool. Does anyone have any recommendations for sources of inspiration for converting Magic of Incarnum to Pathfinder?
I would like to put my conversions up in the conversion library or the wiki, but since Magic of Incarnum is not open source, I don't know if that will be subject to issues or not. Thoughts?

Thursday, 16th October, 2014

Thanks for the test and the feedback! What level is the party?
On a side (but related) note, I'm actually running my own game these days, and the party has just attacked a mountain fortress wherein lies a tribe of desert-dwelling people who've been making their living by banditry. Last session the party took care of most of the noncombatant tribe members and mooks, and this coming weekend they go after the leadership who gathered together on the top level to figure out a plan to deal with the intruders. One of the leaders is a 6th-level Totemist using the Monstershaper Archetype, so I'm about to get my own (brief) playtest here. Of course, as an NPC enemy it's more or less intended that he go down in defeat (if not death), but he'll be fighting tooth and claw to avoid that. Should be interesting!
The actual top leader of the tribe is an Azurin Barbarian 8 with a couple of Incarnum feats (including the ridiculously obvious Cobalt Rage), but that's neither here nor there- not a playtest of the I...

Tuesday, 10th December, 2013

Easy solution: Iatric [Effect] is only Divine; make Cosmic and higher versions of it. We even have templates for how the magnitude should change, in the form of Divine [Effect] -> Cosmic [Effect] -> Transcendental [Effect]. The existence of Ultima [Effect] also suggests that you could do a "repeating" version at the next higher tier, such as a Cosmic version of Iatric that is exactly like Iatric except that it repeats for [Divine Rank] rounds.
We did similar things in my game when we started to seriously get into divine rankings above 4, because the players were noticing all kinds of gaps in their available choices. As a somewhat complicated example, we've had house rules for what I call "advanced energy" types for longer than I can even remember to tell you, which are considered essentially equal in value to Force (in point of fact, Force is one of the types). An example of one of the other types that everybody's game has is the type called Disruption, which is defined as being "the energy typ...

Friday, 29th November, 2013

Ah, that's good news! Have you found the "Infused Soulmeld" mechanic to work well? What level are you, how many are in the party?
Well at the moment it does seem somewhat powerful, however this is probably only because due to the nature of the campaign, the party is essentially in a universe that lacks magic.

Friday, 22nd November, 2013

These sound like changes worthy of a whole new class. The spellcasting alone really wasn't.
I agree. While I love the mechanic, I think it would have been fine as an archetype added to wizards and sorcerers. Although I'd like to see it expanded to more classes, honestly. I think it would work really well with the new shaman, for example.

Friday, 15th November, 2013

"Where could they go with the Swashbuckler idea that hasn't already been covered?" was "Guns. Hmmm, does that mean it hybrids with Gunslinger?" The way the Grit mechanic recharges is something to make this class shine, I agree.
.
I was assuming that they would take the grit mechanic but leave the guns. My assumption was that you could use the grit to perform stunts and regain grit by doing your stunts with flair.

Saturday, 26th October, 2013

Any double weapon with the Throwing property, of course. ;)
In the context of being able to be a returning weapon, I meant.
Taking a weapon and enchanting it with throwing so it can then be enchanted with returning ("This special ability can only be placed on a weapon that can be thrown.") seems a bit circular and silly to me.

First and foremost, the stats and abilities it provides. I usually make a character intending to go with a specific class, and race is a secondary choice for me. Therefore, I pick a race which will enhance my class choice.
After I have a subset of races (there usually isn't Just One (possibly-)Good Choice), I'll look at the setting lore and see what "clicks" better with the class I'm going for- as well as providing interesting RP hooks from which to design character background and such.
Yup, same here. Mostly, my concepts are about class, not race.
If it weren't for stat boosts, 90% of my characters would be human because honestly, humanoids are essentially just human sub-races that magnify a particular aspect or two of humanity. And I can't be arsed to remember those little '+1 to this' and '+4 against purple-skinned monsters' frills that come with so many races.

Friday, 11th October, 2013

It's similar to the Stunting mechanic from Exalted, in fact. Take the time to compare the two, and the sorts of actions which trigger Boons look remarkably like the actions one can take to get extra dice in Exalted. That's not remotely coincidental, I'm sure.I hadn't thought about that. But yeah, convergent evolution at the very least; they're trying to encourage very similar activities.
Cheers!
Kinak

Thursday, 10th October, 2013

No, it really isn't settled, since Google leads you to wikipedia which lists both pronunciations of "Drow" on that page. :p Chuckle all you like and be as petty as you wish- the issue is not settled and likely will not be for the foreseeable future. I don't care what your little pronunciation site says; I never saw it before your link and see no reason to accept it as authoritative now. But given that on Thursday night I had to go to an emergency room and spend two nights in a hospital, and have spent much of this week scrambling to set up follow-up doctor appointments among other things, I have better things to do than argue pronunciations on the Internet.
I'm really sorry I upset you. It was not my intention to make you angry, and that article was just supposed to be a useful and interesting resource. I was just having a little fun over what I felt was a trivial matter. Please accept my apologies.

Sunday, 6th October, 2013

Amusing though this pun is, it's worth pointing out that it only works when people mispronounce the word Lich- it's actually supposed to be pronounced "leek" (more or less).
Almost everyone disagrees with you - including Gary Gygax, WotC, and etymologists. :)

Wednesday, 2nd October, 2013

Your poll seems to assume we run sessions away from home. Is that intentional? My games for the past 10 years have been almost all online, in chat rooms and such. So I'm always home and have access to my full collection.
If you're running a game online, you aren't really the focus of this poll.

Monday, 9th September, 2013

If you don't consider spells a class feature, or are bored by having them, then you really aren't looking to play a caster at all; spells are the ultimate 'class meat' as you put it above. Spells are more versatile and open-ended than any other possible class feature in Pathfinder, unless you include Psionics from Dreamscarred Press (and even if you do, psionic powers are really just reskinned spells on a spell-points system rather than vancian spell-slot mechanics).
In other words, it's looking to me like your real problem is an internal one; what's blocking you is You. You've apparently always dismissed spells as "not being a class feature" because they don't show up directly in the class table like Favored Enemy or Smite Evil, and so you've never actually taken a good hard look at what they can do or be. There's a very good reason pure-caster classes get few to no class features besides spells, in PF.
Would it help, I wonder, if the Class Table were rewritten to specify "Level X Spells" as ...

That's not remotely what most people who make the comment about direct-damage not being a good option mean. What it means is, magic isn't only about destroying enemies- and the spells that are designed solely to destroy enemies are usually bad options compared to other things. Put it this way: which would you rather do, put a fist-sized bolt of pure plasma through the chest of a couple of creatures that were silly enough to stand in a line for you, or fly up out of the reach of all those idiots bashing each other with metal sticks on the ground so you can consider how to screw with them next? Would you rather give an orc a joy-buzzer powerful enough to actually hurt him and knock him on his butt for a few seconds, or make a huge spiderweb that traps that orc and all his friends in place so your fighter buddy can turn them into pincushions with his longbow without interference?
Usually, the best spell options aren't purely combative, they're the utility-and-control spells like Black Tentacles or...

If we're getting into literary recommendations, I have one to make.
If you'd like to read a literary description of the Far Realm itself, and what it truly means to go or "exist" there (so to speak), I cannot recommend highly enough that you hunt down a copy of a story written by H.P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffman Price. "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" contains the single best description of the Far Realm that I have ever encountered, and that includes the description in 3.0 Manual of the Planes (although the MoP description is certainly more evocative in terms of imagery).
It's a rare story; most collections of Lovecraft stories don't include it- but if you find it and read it, you will understand what I meant. And to a large degree, why the Far Realm drives people insane.
On a personal note, that story is also what led me to postulate that Uvuudaums are essentially the Platonic "perfect Forms" (or Archetypes, in the philosophical sense) of various types of real people. That, in turn,...

Saturday, 7th September, 2013

So, really, the item ability could go either way. Clearly it's supposed to be better than just regular old Invisibility, but that still leaves the question... how much better, exactly?
Exactly, i really hope they'll make some light into the matter as soon as possible.
Cadence: I see you point but razionalize things just don't work in a rule set where people launch fireball, fly, gods walk on earth and so on.

Sunday, 1st September, 2013

Something wrong with the Daemons that Paizo put in Bestiary 2? I thought everything in the official PRD was open game content.The thing is, those daemons are incarnations of death and oblivion, not cutthroat merchants, and they're missing the daemons I mentioned in my first post because the Tome of Horrors decided not to include them.

Friday, 30th August, 2013

I would be genuinely surprised if the number of regular players of D&D derivatives who (at least once per month or more) read online forums about their games of choice and the companies which make said games, was not at least that high.
And I'd be genuinely surprised if the number wasn't tiny.
The gamers involved in my groups weren't just high school and college students, but also people in regular life; I myself was working at UPS for most of the time in question, and a fellow UPSer was running one of the games I'm counting (as well as being involved in another as a player). One of our other players was a math professor at a nearby university, and still another guy was an artist getting by doing odd jobs for the time being. So a significant slice of life there.
Exactly like the rest of us, then!